Transforming Early English

This book accounts for later re-workings of early English and Scottish texts, arguing for a new interdisciplinary approach to textual studies from an angle of historical pragmatics. It will appeal to researchers and higher-level students in historical linguistics and book history and to those interested more broadly in sociocultural formation.

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Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots.